The Ares Decision

Author’s Note

It all started for me when I was one year old.

My father came in and announced that he’d quit his job and joined the FBI — something my mother didn’t even know he was interested in. We were shipped off to her parents while he trained in Quantico and then quickly found ourselves in Salt Lake City, one of our many homes over the years.

As it turns out, this wasn’t as impulsive as it first seemed. My father grew up in a small cotton-farming town in southeast Missouri, and on a visit to his family when I was a teenager, my grandmother told me the story of his first encounter with the Bureau. It was 1953 and there had been a bank robbery in the area, prompting an FBI agent to interview the owner of the local general store. My father, then twelve years old, wandered in for supplies and hid behind a shelf to listen. When he got home, he told his mother about the experience — that the man had been “dressed real fine and talked real good.” And that one day he, too, would be a G-man. She just smiled.

Growing up in a Bureau family is about as interesting as it gets, but also a bit challenging. Of course, there are the constant moves that can be tough on a kid trying to fit in. Even stranger, though, is the sense of secrecy. It may be that my early training as a novelist came from filling in imaginary details to circumspect conversations I overheard. The need-to-know attitude is oddly pervasive, as anyone who has watched my father and me move a ladder will attest. It’s always teetering upright with him yelling “Left! Right! Not that far right, for Christ’s sake!” Now that he’s retired, I aspire to get him to just tell me the ladder’s final destination before we pick it up. I’m not hopeful, though.

Whatever the negatives, it was all worth it. How many kids get to have dinner with a man who, by law, cannot be photographed? Or drink a beer with the SAS? Or discuss Northern Ireland with the head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary? And then there was the time I came home from my summer job and was told that we were having dinner with an insurance salesman who needed help with the FBI-related sections of his third novel. He was nice enough to bring us a copy of his first effort. It had been published by the Naval Institute Press under the title The Hunt for Red October.

And how many people get to read about their college graduation dinner in history books? It was 1988 and my family was at a restaurant in London where my father was the legal attaché. About halfway through the hors d’oeuvres, someone from the embassy came in and told us that a Pan Am flight had gone down in a little town called Lockerbie. That was the last I saw of my father for months.

With all this cloak and dagger, it was hard not to be a huge fan of thriller novels. The first I can remember reading was Shogun, still vivid in my mind because I was supposed to do my seventh-grade book report on it and was a little shocked to find out there was a second volume. I wasn’t only a fan, though, I was also a critic. Authors who made factual errors or failed to faithfully capture the operatives they wrote about drove me crazy. And that led me to focus on the masters of the genre — people like Jack Higgins, John le Carré, and Robert Ludlum.

So it’s a great honor for my eleventh novel to be part of the Covert-One series. Hopefully, you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Kyle Mills

May 12, 2011